Law library budgets can easily grow wild like sprawling and untamed gardens. In the past, law librarians could be managing literally thousands of print titles spread across dozens of locations. The pandemic accelerated the full embrace of digital alternatives to print. Today many law firm libraries have small print collections but a large and complex network of digital licenses. Law firm mergers, the opening of new offices and the continuous churn of lateral partners can play havoc with budgets and orderly management of both digital and print collections.
We have all been confronted with an invoice which prompts us to pause and wonder “Why are we paying for that?”
The legal tech market is bursting with innovative new Generative AI products. Sometimes the only way to pay for a new resource, is to purge the collection of lesser used, duplicative or legacy products which have been automatically renewed without any analysis.
Over the course of my career I have grappled with the unruly forces of full “mergers of equals,” partial mergers, office openings, office closing, spin-offs, practice group migrations…. Practices expand or shrink over time. Partners come and go and often leave behind a legacy of resources that no longer have a devoted champion.
The best way to control costs is to develop processes and protocols for each of the 3 major product lifecycle benchmarks: acquisition, renewal and cancellation.
The full article is posted on Legal Tech HubContinue Reading Why Are we Paying for That? 10 Tips and Techniques for Taming a Library Budget and Optimizing ROI
analytics for proactive management of digital resources. Law libraries were already reducing their print resources before the 2020 pandemic. The sudden and long term shift to remote work resulted in a dramatic conversion to digital resources. This means that a significant proportion of the resources budget has shifted to digital formats. What’s a law librarians to do? Research Monitor has always offered a significant suite of digital reports for computing utilization ROI. This is often translated as “cost per user” and “cost per session.” The Optimize platform is more flexible and intuitive and offers great “out of the box” graphics.